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Comment by skdotdan | Hacker News Reader

Owning that much cash, why they don't just buy the companies that they need?

Apple as an ARM cofounder could have bought ARM in the past but they didn't want to own it completely if these could be useful for other industry players. Foxconn would be benefits from Toshiba.

No way a foreign company will be allowed to buy Toshiba due to national security concerns. One of domestic players will be to chip in and be partial owner.

Why national security..? If there's a world war and all of a sudden Japan doesn't have computers? (genuinely curious)

Perhaps they meant economic security.

>If there's a world war and all of a sudden Japan doesn't have computers?

Pretty much. If you're at war you need that materials to feed the war machine, which includes the metal to build the plane as well as the computers that go in the cockpit (and let's not forget the knowledge to build it all).

Got it.

Kind of makes sense.

They just don't want the Chinese to get DRAM fab technology and then flood the market with cheap parts.

I don't think the issue is actually national security as much as preserving Japan's relatively closed economic system of interlocking corporate ownership / keiretsu.

Why am I being down-voted? That's the standard bargain Japan has with the US. It goes back to the Cold War. I'm not passing judgment; it's just a known matter of fact that their economy is rather closed to outside investment, especially controlling interests.

Toshiba has been having a lot of trouble lately thanks to Westinghouse, so the Abe's government might consider foreign control to be a lesser evil than massive layoffs or a bailout.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-04-11/toshiba-r...

If you operate in too many fields it may get difficult to take care of all of them. Parts of the organization can become inefficient. Also it means that top management needs to split their focus on more topics.

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